Labor Secretary Martin J. Walsh is leaving the Biden administration to become executive director of the National Hockey League Players’ Association, the union announced on Thursday.
Mr. Walsh, a former Boston mayor who had led the city’s powerful Building and Construction Trades Council, helped to bolster the Biden administration’s pro-union credentials and usher in a period of more aggressive workplace regulation after the relatively hands-off approach during the Trump administration.
Mr. Walsh said in a statement that he would leave the Labor Department in mid-March.
Alongside President Biden, who has been more vocal about supporting unions than any other president in decades, Mr. Walsh was arguably the administration’s most visible proponent of unions. He joined Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in meeting union organizers at the White House, and he served as vice chairman of an administration task force exploring how the federal government could increase union membership.
Although union membership fell to 10.1 percent of the work force last year, the lowest rate on record, the country added nearly 300,000 union members amid a wave of worker organizing at major corporations including Starbucks, Amazon and Apple. (The rate fell because the work force grew even more rapidly.) Mr. Walsh cheered on the trend and warned employers to respect workers’ desire to unionize and refrain from coercive tactics.
“As secretary of labor, I don’t appreciate that,” he said in an...
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